Codie Sanchez's REAL Framework for Building Trust

The title of Codie Sanchez's latest BigDeal episode is "How to Speak with the Richest 1%," and yes, fine, she means it literally. There's a whole section about what she observed on the set of Shark Tank. There are name-drops. The aspirational ceiling is unmistakably high.

But here's what I kept thinking while working through it: almost nothing in this framework requires a wealthy person to work on. The double opt-in rule — never make an introduction without permission from both parties. The bad-day principle — show up when someone's getting dragged publicly, and don't follow it with an ask. The "what are you afraid to tell me" reframe for getting honest feedback. Every single one of these applies at the mid-level manager layer. The coordinator level. The "I've been at this company nine years and I can't get a straight answer from my skip-level" level.

Sanchez is pitching access to the ultra-wealthy. What she's actually describing is how trust works in any hierarchy. That gap between the marketing and the substance is worth sitting with.

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The deposit problem most people don't see coming

Sanchez opens with a framework she calls the relationship balance equation: value deposited minus favors withdrawn equals your relationship capital. Simple enough. But her sharper observation is about when people go negative.

"The truth is most people go negative on the very first call, and then they wonder why nobody picks up the second time."

She's describing the classic mistake of reaching out to someone powerful with a request dressed up as an introduction. You ask for a coffee. You ask them to look at something. You make a blind intro that puts them on the hook for someone they've never met. Each of these is a withdrawal from an account that has no deposits yet, and — this is the part people miss — the account holder notices, even if they're too polite to say so.

The double opt-in rule is elegant in its simplicity: before making any introduction, confirm with both parties that they actually want to be connected. Sanchez learned this the way most people learn things about professional norms — by violating one early in her career, watching the damage, and reverse-engineering what went wrong. The person who gets burned by an unsolicited intro doesn't usually tell you. They just quietly stop trusting you with anything that matters.

This is not 1% advice. This is advice for anyone who has ever forwarded a résumé, tagged two people in a LinkedIn post, or cc'd a colleague on an email without checking first. The hierarchy just makes the consequences more visible.

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Trust is built in bad weather

The section on earning trust is where Sanchez gets most specific, and most honest. Her argument: everyone shows up for a launch party, a press moment, a funding announcement. The crowd that gathers around a win tells you almost nothing about the actual relationship. What tells you everything is who disappears when the story goes negative.

"Powerful people never ever forget who showed up while it was on fire. Everyone can clap at a win. A loss is the only thing that tells you who's real."

She also makes the converse point, which I think is underappreciated: showing up during someone's hard time and then immediately following it with an ask is worse than not showing up at all. It retroactively reframes the support as a transaction. The math in someone's head flips from "this person is genuinely kind" to "oh, that was an investment."

The practical instruction is almost uncomfortably simple: if someone you respect is having a public rough stretch, reach out, say something genuine, and then disappear without an agenda. That's it. No leverage, no follow-up, no converting the goodwill into a meeting request. Sanchez says a single three-word message — "I got you" — from someone she barely knew during one of her own difficult weeks built a connection she still honors. The person never tried to cash it in.

Again: nothing about this requires wealth or access. It requires paying attention to other people and resisting the impulse to make every gesture a set-up for something else. Most people can't do it consistently. That's why it's rare.

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The sycophancy problem is an org chart problem

Here is where I want to slow down, because Sanchez frames this as a rich-person problem and I think that framing actually undersells it.

She draws on research covered by Northwestern's Kellogg Insight, which found that inducing feelings of power in people made them measurably worse at reading others — less attuned to facial expressions, more likely to assume others share their knowledge and perspective. The exact competencies that often drive people's rise become compromised by the position they've risen to. That's not a CEO problem. That's a "you just got promoted to team lead" problem.

What happens organizationally, Sanchez explains, is what researchers call the "mum effect": people are averse to delivering bad news, so they soften it, delay it, or quietly omit the parts they think will land badly. Multiply that across every layer of a hierarchy and the picture that reaches the top has been through enough editorial hands that it barely resembles what's happening on the ground.

Sanchez draws on Machiavelli's account of Emperor Maximilian to illustrate this — a leader so paranoid about leaks that he told no one his real plans until the moment of execution, then reversed himself the moment any adviser pushed back. Sanchez's reading of Machiavelli's diagnosis: a court fills with flatterers not because people are malicious but because disagreement carries a cost. The fix, as Sanchez extracts it, isn't radical openness. It's engineering a small, explicit channel where honesty is actually permitted — and then protecting that channel.

What I keep thinking about here is the first time most people soften a piece of bad news for a manager. You're not lying. You're protecting the relationship, or buying yourself time, or just avoiding a reaction you've already learned to anticipate. You're doing what the mum effect predicts: editing the story before it reaches the person with power over you. And if enough people on your team are doing the same thing simultaneously, the leader at the top is operating on a version of reality that their organization quietly assembled for them. Nobody lied. Nobody decided to deceive. The distortion happened in aggregate, in small increments, across human relationships where the power runs only one way.

Sanchez's practical question — "What are you afraid to tell me because you think I won't like it?" — is not a trick. It's a structural intervention. You're making it safe to hand over the unedited version. It works when you protect the person who answers it honestly and don't punish the content.

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The Sun Tzu detour and what it's really saying

Sanchez closes with a riff on Sun Tzu's Art of War, specifically the chapter on spies. The core argument from that chapter: real foreknowledge — the kind that actually lets a leader make good decisions — can only come from people with direct, unmediated access to ground-level reality. Not reports. Not summaries. Not the scroll that's passed through five hands before it reaches the tent.

Sanchez translates this as "eyes to eyes": go see for yourself. Call the customer directly. Walk the floor. Find one channel to the front line that nobody gets to polish before it reaches you. And she adds a pointed note for employees: the person who gets promoted isn't the one who kept things smooth. It's the one who walked in with the smoke and an extinguisher.

That framing lands differently depending on where you sit. If you're the person in the corner office, it's a directive to stop trusting the filtered version. If you're the person whose filtered version reaches the corner office — which is most of the workforce — it's a different kind of permission: you are allowed to bring the real problem, as long as you bring a proposed solution with it.

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What Sanchez has built in the REAL framework — Respect their time, Earn trust, Ask for truth, Live in reality — is nominally a roadmap for crashing exclusive rooms. But the moves she describes are really just a description of what it looks like to be genuinely useful to another person inside a hierarchical system. Stop performing pursuit. Make deposits before withdrawals. Show up when it costs you something. Ask the question that makes it safe to be honest.

The irony, which I don't think she fully names but which runs underneath the whole episode, is that the framework for accessing power is to stop acting like someone who needs it. The person who elbows their way toward the sharks at Shark Tank gets noticed and forgotten. The person who sits back and doesn't reach for a slice of anything gets invited back.

For the person who's been working for fifteen years and is tired of playing a game that keeps changing its rules — that inversion might be the most useful thing here. Not as a tactic. As a way of deciding what kind of presence you want to be.

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By Vanessa Torres, Career & Workplace Writer, BuzzRAG